Embodiments of the present invention relate to databases, and in particular to user interfaces allowing optimization of models that reference data from an underlying database.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Databases offer a way of storing large volumes of related information in a powerful and efficient manner. Information stored in database(s), may be accessed by a user as part of modeling efforts, for example to describe ongoing behavior of a complex system, and then to predict future behavior of such a system.
As part of its operation, a model may seek to manipulate database information in a computationally-intensive manner. For example, a model may comprise multiple steps that each call for combination (e.g. by UNION or JOIN operations) of thousands or even millions of stored database records.
Currently, few tools allow an end user to evaluate and/or refine properties of a model based upon its performance. Instead, modeling is typically conducted in an ad-hoc manner, utilizing trial-and-error based primarily upon the end user's past experience. Such manual approaches to model creation/optimization are time-consuming, and are limited to those select few end users with sufficient experience affording an intuitive grasp of model structure and performance.
Moreover the difficulty of evaluating and optimizing model performance may be exacerbated, as the underlying databases and the models accessing them, increase in size and complexity. The pool of available end users may be even further limited, when models are imported from an external source into an existing modeling tool.
Accordingly, embodiments address these and other issues with user interfaces affording optimization of models based upon database information.